


The Marigold Walk

by AngelDormais



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Arthur Morgan was always depressed, Brotherly Love, Father Figures, Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pre-Canon, The Curious Couple and their unruly sons, Young Arthur Morgan, Young John Marston
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 07:50:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18384119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelDormais/pseuds/AngelDormais
Summary: As he and Dutch stood outside the saloon at night, passing a cigar back and forth, he’d said as much in a fit of poetic melancholy. Dutch had laughed at him soon as the words left his mouth.“Well, Hosea,” he’d said, ashing the cigar against a hitching post, and his eyes glimmered in the half-moon light the way they did when he had something grand and enormous behind them that only he could see. “Some hearts are eager to bleed for the unfortunate. Eyes like that, I reckon they’ll cut yours and mine just fine.”(Or: Dutch and Hosea see things before they see people. Opportunities and trouble. Fire and ghosts. It's a slow walk, but Hosea discovers that he is like a human being, and will do what it takes to keep Arthur from becoming something else.)





	The Marigold Walk

**Author's Note:**

> an interlude to everything else i'm procrastinating on, because...... i love found family so much and the early days of the van der linde gang is so uniquely ridiculous that i can't stop thinking about it. so i'm joining the fray. these will come in loosely-connected snapshot format, and i don't know how long it will turn out, but expect a lot of old men reluctantly having a crisis over the sons they didn't realize they were going to love this much. that's really all this is gonna be, honestly.
> 
> bear with me because i'm going to fudge timelines a bit... but i don't think r* knows what the hell is going on most of the time either so i think i'm safe.
> 
> please enjoy!
> 
> -angel

He and Dutch had different stories on how they found Arthur Morgan.

Ask Dutch, and he’d spin a yarn of silk and matted blood. Fourteen, he’d say, or thereabouts - Arthur’s daddy never taught him much counting or paid attention to his birthdays, so who knew really - and there was fire in his eyes. Found him the day he brandished a knife at them, half-starved and _mean_ , and that’s what endeared him to them so quick. Their American Dream, or the personification of everything that was fucked up about it, all gangly limbs and like a cornered animal, delivered right to them.

Dutch never said much more than that. But that’s how Dutch was; he liked talking about the part where they saved the beaten and downtrodden, liked tying the stories neatly up with little bows, and maybe that’s how he really remembered it. Remembered the fire and remembered taking his metal to it, cauterizing each of Arthur’s awful little wounds.

Hosea was a conman and nobody asked him much his version. Which is just as well, because he remembers what Dutch doesn’t.

The knife was the day after. What happened before that was sadder and meaner by miles.

They found him with hands full of mud at the gallows, pulling a hat with a frayed rope tied to it off a corpse. It was a novelty at first, seeing a boy of maybe fourteen looting a body nobody would yell at him for. The most interesting thing they’d come across so far in an overwhelmingly unpropitous livestock town.

They were set to ignore him, otherwise, because they had business at the bank that mostly involved marveling at how sad and unappealing it was. Like everything else in that shithole. Until they passed by the gallows again, in the evening this time, and he was still standing there, the law and the crowd long gone. They stopped, curiously sharing a look, and the boy just stood there and stared at the body. Just stared at it, swinging like a pocket watch in the dust-bitten wind.

“You all right there, son?” Dutch had called out, warily.

The boy had turned to look at them, the color of his eyes drowned in the shadow of the too-big hat.

“I ain’t your son,” he said darkly. Jabbed a thumb over his shoulder like it wasn't a dead body there. “Was his.”

And Hosea knew a cornered animal when he saw one, even when it was a boy, and he said low and warningly: “Dutch.”

“Well,” Dutch had said with his sugared sympathy, adjusting the reins in his hands; “I’m mighty sorry to hear that. No one should have to witness such a thing. The law has done you wrong, allowing you to be here.”

“Guess so.” The boy sounded unmoved. He was watching them with a dull sort of interest, wiping his hands clean.

“Do you have anywhere to go, Mister…?”

He looked between the two of them, eyes flashing, and seemed to rightly think that a pair of shifty men happening across his business weren’t worth trusting his name to. Then he seemed to slump sideways a little, and Hosea saw the shift of someone who suddenly decided that he didn’t care.

“Arthur. And sure.” He’d laughed, dryly, in a way that young boys shouldn’t laugh. “Reckon I’ll go hungry, eventually.”

Dutch had looked over at Hosea meaningfully. And damn him, damn the both of them, Hosea had sighed and shaken his head, dismounting right there and leading his horse to hitch it at the railing nearby.

“Well, it doesn’t have to be be tonight,” he said kindly. “Tell you what. My partner and I are headed to the saloon for cards. We’ll buy you a meal.”

Dutch, coming up on Hosea’s side, had chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder. His mustache was ticked up at the corner and his eyes were flashing with dangerous interest.

“If we are very lucky men, perhaps we can be convinced to leave a drink unattended, too.”

Arthur had stood there, staring at them the same way he’d been staring at his dead father: like they had nothing in this world that he wanted. Or maybe that he’d given up wanting. But he’d shuffled back and forth, a youthful uncertainty breaking across that rockish veneer, and his eyes had turned downward.

“Don’t have nowhere else,” he reasoned.

And then Dutch, the stupid man he was, strode forward with his hands on his sides, shaking his head fondly.

“Few of us truly do, son,” he’d said, and reached out his hand to rest it on Arthur’s shoulder.

And Arthur had flinched. Looked away from them both, so that Hosea finally caught a real glimmer of his eyes against the sun, and saw they were blue and gold, but also saw coals buried in a deep fog. The kind that comes from a man's brain, that he can drown in. Too young to have eyes like that, smoking and angry and ready to die quiet or loud. 

_He's already lost, like everyone else,_ his mind supplied cruelly, but his eyes moved down Arthur slowly, taking in the gaunt of his cheeks and the splits in his knuckles and knees and something else in him, stronger, wondered how much a decent room in town would cut into their savings. 

And that, Hosea supposed, was when he’d realized the exact kind of fools he and Dutch were about to make themselves into.

 

* * *

 

In the end, Arthur was just an angry little urchin when they found him: just spines and salt and soft angles rubbed raw before they ever had the chance to sharpen. He’d been worn down and de-fanged by the world and there wasn’t much they could do, Hosea had reasoned.

They’d fed him and clothed him with some of Hosea’s spares and left him up in a room. It was the least they could do for no reason. But they couldn’t give him back something he’d never had didn’t even want. In his eyes was where the edges were, but bladed eyes in a soft and red face still couldn’t cut.

As he and Dutch stood outside the saloon at night, passing a cigar back and forth, he’d said as much in a fit of poetic melancholy. Dutch had laughed at him soon as the words left his mouth.

“Well, Hosea,” he’d said, ashing the cigar against a hitching post, and his eyes glimmered in the half-moon light the way they did when he had something grand and enormous behind them that only he could see. “Some hearts are eager to bleed for the unfortunate. Eyes like that, I reckon they’ll cut yours and mine just fine.”

They were fools that way, though.

“He’ll be trouble, Dutch,” Hosea warned, but his heart did hurt and wasn’t in it.

“I am sure he will.”

“This ain’t some sideshow you can pick up for your amusement,” he’d said hotly. “That’s a _boy_ , stupid and sad. Watched his old man swing and didn’t seem too sorry. Not sure there’s much we can do for him.”

“But _think,_ Hosea!” Dutch was bouncing on his heels, almost childlike in his excitement, and Hosea snatched the cigar from him before it ended up in the mud. Dutch threw his hands up to the window where Arthur slept, or brooded, or something else. “Think of what he can do for _us._ ”

Hosea had felt his face heating up with anger. He didn't mean it badly, but sometimes there was just something unintentionally nasty about the way Dutch phrased things. “Jesus, what are you on about? He’s just a kid.”

“The world’s done him wrong, Hosea, and there’s a fire in him for it. Didn’t you see?”

“I saw a kid who don’t care too much whether he lives or lies down on the side of the road and lets a wagon run him over.”

Dutch looked at him. “So we're to let him?”

The smoke twisted in his lungs, then, something terrible. He coughed it out and waved it away, grimacing. His mouth was dry when he swallowed, and tried to say something, and then said instead: “He ain’t our business, Dutch.”

His friend’s eyes glittered with something. Disappointment, or maybe sympathy, something Hosea hated either way.

“Give him a chance. You’ll see what I see, someday.”

“So there’s a someday, is there?” Hosea had grumbled, but that was that. He’d shoved the cigar right into Dutch’s mouth and leaned back against the steps, looked up into the hotel window, and saw a shadow that reminded him of wolves and irons and campfire ghosts.

 

* * *

 

It turned out that “someday”, in fact, was the very day after. When they’d opened the door to Arthur’s room and he’d fumbled a knife at them, intending to rob them or some other act of impulse by an angry and scared kid, and the look on Dutch’s face had been entirely worth it.

"Well go on, or he'll cut you," Hosea said between peals of laughter as he leaned against the doorway. Baffled, Dutch looked between the two of them, unbuckling his satchel and handing it over. Arthur clumsily grabbed at it, eyes wild, his other hand caught between thrusting the knife out and keeping Hosea's coat pulled over his shoulders.

"Sorry, misters. It's nothin' personal," Arthur had muttered. Actually _apologized_ as he shook like an angry leaf and robbed them blind. Then he'd put his knife clean away, hopped towards the window, and threw himself out of it like some kind of crazy little monkey.

“Well, Dutch,” Hosea had said a minute later as they mounted their horses, watching Arthur skid and scramble around the corner clutching Dutch’s satchel; “I reckon you were right. There’s a fire in him after all.”

“Shut up and ride,” Dutch had grumbled.

He led them straight out of town, and none of them looked back.


End file.
